Year: 2006

Following up on the Yahoo memo, I found it interesting to read the section regarding the effort level at Yahoo. I believe the larger your company grows, the harder it is to get everybody driving hard–especially at the levels of a startup. For as much as people love to lobby for the “startup mentality” at…

The shakeup at Yahoo is a fascinating reflection of the life and times of a tech company. Now many consider Yahoo a competitor to Microsoft and I have no interest in disparaging their company, but this is an interesting business case study and there is a lot of learn here from a strictly academic perspective….

Why yes, I did. In the words of Jim Newkirk, I “drank the Kool-Aid” and picked one up. Rarely have I seen such a fascinating launch of a product from Microsoft–it’s certainly the most interesting in my 5+ years here. The first thing everyone does is compare it to the iPod (fair) and proclaim that it’s…

Has anyone else noticed how much the word “innovation” gets tossed around lately. I think it has always been important in the technology industry where it is seen as the holy grail. We all aspire to be innovative and be called innovative. Personally, I’ve tried to stray from the word a little bit because it’s like one of…

Bob Rebholz, our resident Group Product Manager and all-around sharp guy, just got back from the Web 2.0 conference. When he mentioned he was going down there, I had little idea about the magnitude of the conference. Silly me–it seems everyone was there and they all had their plans for how the new web was…

The challenge of being a fan of open source while working at Microsoft is that people often assume that it’s not possible for Microsoft to appreciate open source. If there’s one legacy that I’d like to leave at Microsoft to this point, it’s that I fought hard for a CodePlex to be built because I…

For the last few weeks, I’ve been spending one day a week sitting in the shared workspace that several members of the Microsoft.com Commuinities team uses. We have about nine people sharing one large office in Building 6 that was once home to Bill Gates and then Steve Ballmer. “So what?”, you may say. Well, I’m a manager…

I was taking a look at the latest news around CodePlex recently and I started noticing a fascinating trend. Many people have described us as “Microsoft’s SourceForge Killer”, suggesting we built this site to eliminate SourceForge. In fact, that’s a trend with everything Microsoft does. Think about it. Everyone calls Zune the iPod killer. The…

Along with CodePlex, our team builds community applications for Microsoft.com. Included are the Forums, Chats, Blogs, etc. One of the interesting things that has happened over the years is that our applications have managed to stay somewhat siloed. In a service-oriented world where we talk about architectures of loosely-coupled applications, there has been little coupling…

So I’m not exactly what you’d call an early adopter. Sure, I try to stay up-to-date with all the trends, but I’ve always had a saying that I (like many people) like to be second. I want to get something early, but I’d rather see someone else have success with it first before I have…